Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court declined to hear cases on gay rights, campaign finance and lethal
injections yesterday. As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for turning down the
appeals.

The gay-rights case, Elane Photography v. Willock, was an appeal from a wedding photographer in
New Mexico who asserted a constitutional right to refuse to provide her services to gay
couples.

The issue was similar to one argued before the court last month, over whether companies could
refuse to provide insurance coverage for contraception on religious grounds. But the New Mexico
case was based on a claim of free speech, not religious liberty.

The photographer, Elaine Huguenin, objected to a New Mexico law prohibiting businesses from
discriminating against gay people. She said requiring her to photograph same-sex weddings violated
her First Amendment rights because she was forced to say something she did not believe.

She rejected a request from a lesbian couple, Vanessa Willock and Misti Collinsworth, to
document their commitment ceremony. The women, who hired another photographer, filed a bias
complaint against Huguenin’s studio, Elane Photography.

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled for the couple, saying Huguenin’s “services can be regulated,
even though those services include artistic and creative work.” Laws banning discrimination, the
court said, apply to “creative or expressive professions.”

The justices also declined to hear a campaign-finance case, Iowa Right to Life Committee v.
Tooker, which was a challenge to an Iowa law that bars contributions from corporations but allows
them from unions. The case was brought by James Bopp Jr., one of the lawyers on the winning side
last week in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the court struck down aggregate
contribution limits in federal elections.

Bopp challenged the Iowa law on two grounds. He said distinguishing between corporations and
unions violated equal-protection principles. And, in any event, “Banning corporate political
contributions violates the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court also declined to hear two cases concerning whether Death Row inmates have a
right to know what chemicals states plan to use to execute them.